@Blue I don't think there's anything wrong with using metal plates, but I'm skeptical about the practical advantage - I wouldn't have expected metal to be cheaper than ceramic since it has to be quality steel (right?) and I'm not sure how ceramic would be harder to "maintain"

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Uh, no. They're not really made of "quality steel". They use cheap metal plates in the local shops

@MoziburUllah Yes, you can introduce gauge-fixing terms into gauge theories, but that's not really the best indication that you have a gauge theory on your hands - the clearest indication is the solutions to the equations of motion being non-unique.

@MoziburUllah I think it shows less than is commonly claimed - since it doesn't indicate the importance of $A$ itself but merely of line integrals of it over closed curves, which is the flux through the area bounded by such a line - but together with the fact that a least action formulation in terms of $E$ and $B$ instead of $A$ is very ugly and infeasible I think it's enough to show that we should think in terms of $A$, even if we don't, strictly speaking, need to.

'Math needs physics ideas but certainly not the physics language' so the guy thought it up using physics ideas, but not using the language, makes no sense, you are saying the language he used to think it up is irrelevant when he needed that language to even think it up, it's a ridiculous thought

It's amazing trying to read math in another language and using some of the tricks that exist which really work to help you understand the meaning of words by deconstructing them, stunning how far you can go

Because so many words were inherited in languages like French and English from some old languages, and also because a lot of words in math/physics were taken from Latin/Greek, means a huge proportion of words are decipherable through tricks which is very helpful